Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano resigns from Spotify

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Spotify's podcasting tech chief and Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano will leave the company by the end of June. Spotify confirmed that he submitted his resignation last week, making him the latest high-profile departure from Spotify's podcasting business. He follows after the head of studios and video Courtney Holt and Gimlet Media director Lydia Polgreen left. Holt was the one who cut blockbuster deals with Joe Rogan and the Obamas.

Mignano co-founded Anchor in 2015, which Spotify bought in 2019 for over US$150 million. The streaming service brought in Mignano to head its podcast tech division. As The Verge pointed out, Anchor hasn't produced any big stars. Still, it has become one of the most-used podcast hosting platforms, with one out of four new podcast episodes done through Anchor (according to Livewire Labs).

Anchor and WordPress can turn your blog post into podcasts

As part of Spotify's Stream On event, podcasts played a significant role in its future. One feature to help entice more people to use podcasts is a new partnership between Anchor and WordPress. 

Writers interested in podcasting but don't know where to start can rely on their written works. You can turn your posts into podcasts by either reading the blog posts yourself or using third-party text-to-speech technology that Anchor will offer.

The feature is meant to bring your work to newer audiences without that much extra work. The hope is that it can help create a new revenue stream for you as well. There are other new podcast features we'd like to discuss in future posts.

Source: Anchor

Spotify grows its podcast ambitions with two new acquisitions

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Spotify is building its podcast business through two new acquisitions. The music streaming service acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor. The former is a startup podcast network, while the latter provides creators with tools to help them build, publish, and monetize podcasts. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek claims the company is now the second-biggest podcasting platform and that its podcast users “spend almost twice the time on the platform, and spend even more time listening to music.” And it wants to provide these users with more original programming as well as entice potential listeners to turn their platform into “the world’s number one audio platform.”

The company plans to invest more into podcasts this 2019 and said that it’s willing to spend around US$500 million to grow its podcast business. According to Recode, Spotify paid around US$230 million on Gimlet alone.